Chapter Two
My teeth cut through my bottom lip.
I gnaw my way into the flesh until coppery notes slide over my tongue, leaving a film at the back of my throat.
I’m tapping the same keys I’d been sequencing for the past forty-five minutes.
The last working B-flat on my old sixty-one key keyboard had stopped working and it was fucking with my head.
I press my fingers into my eyes, and hold my breath.
It didn't help that I was tired and hungover, and that the more time I spent drilling this riff, the further I got from finding what was missing.
The constant slow drag of my fingers across notes that didn’t belong felt like an insult, not only to the keys, but to the music I was trying too hard to create.
Harlen had always been better at this than me. He had a way of hearing what I couldn’t, but the seedy fucker wasn’t answering my calls.
I snatch my phone, tapping his number for the sixth time, sucking on the inside of my cheek and clenching my fists. It rings once before hitting his voicemail with a familiar, jarring beep. It hurts like a motherfucker.
“Answer your phone, you fuck. I need you.” My voice is choppy, dry, and turbulent; my hands too, when I kill the call, intending to return to my keys, only to stick my middle finger to them and navigate into my music instead.
I hit play on “No One” by Cold, throwing my phone down on top of the vicious black and white teeth.
The music begins to pour out of the speaker at my side, ringing with the clash of notes bouncing off the peeling sea-moss green walls that make up this shoe-box I’ve never called home.
The room is a tiny, four-point square, with a window that doesn’t open, a ceiling that sits too low and old wood planked flooring that is growing black mold—even though my asshole father was adamant that’s not what it was.
I shove away from my chipped desk and push my hands into the front pocket of my gray hoodie, snatching for my dwindling packet of squashed cigarettes.
I shake the second to last one out and slump back in my chair, tilting to the right because the piece of junk is missing a wheel.
I smoke it almost to the bone, then I reach for my pocketknife.
Knuckles turning white, I begin carving over the word ‘bleed’ that I’d been scratching into my desk for the past week.
My ears zero in on the drums that beat their way through my crackly speakers as I work on vivisecting my desk, smoking the last of my cigarette, hoping something might come from it, that my frustration will push me into some form of greatness.
It doesn’t, though. The way I knew it wouldn’t. Because my father’s words are constant, phantom barks through the back of my head: You are nothing, a nobody, boy. A talentless waste of air space.
I bite my tongue and clench my fists. It’s not that I cared what he thought of me.
The murky-grey lens in which he viewed life meant nothing to me.
But moments like this, ones where I felt like I was constantly throwing myself against walls and getting nowhere, had a way of making me wonder if perhaps his words did carry some form of the truth.
And yet, I clung to the music, because it was the only outlet that wouldn’t kill me, even though it carried limitless stab wounds, twisted blades, and an agonizing bleed out.
My eyes flick between my trashed keys and the word ‘bleed’ when my bedroom door swings open, cracking against the opposite wall.
And I don’t look up, I already know it’s my sister, Jade, because the wafting cloud of jasmine, ocean, and ripe apples that precedes her infiltrates the entrance of my nose.
Pushing the cigarette between my lips, I take a hard pull, watching her thin, pale, and freckled arms curl around my shoulders, cocooning me in a warm hug.
I drop the hand holding my cigarette to her wrist, squeezing it, my muscles softening beneath her forearms.
The tender moment only lasts the length of a short second before she’s stepping back, shoving my head, and snatching at the packet of cigarettes.
I press a knuckle into my eye, twist it, spinning to face her.
Jade pulls herself onto the windowsill, placing the last stick into her mouth and lighting it up.
“Think quick,” she rasps, and the lighter she chucks toward me spins top to tail through the air.
I open my hand, catch it in my fist, saying nothing.
And Jade clocks that—the same way I knew she would. She tilts her head, brows knitting together, her dark, straightened hair rolling down her back. "What's got you all fucked up?”
I pinch the bridge of my nose, run a hand down my stubbly face.
Jade is my younger sister. Sixteen years old. My best friend, my purpose. She is full of life, not necessarily for the stale one she was given, but the one she has grand plans for.
However, since a young age, she had always sat herself between the sharp cracks of mine.
She knows when I’m mad, frustrated, happy, sad, fucking suicidal. Sometimes, I think she knows me better than I know myself.
And I hate that I wasn’t able to shield her from all of that.
I kick forward, stubbing the cigarette out on a small ceramic plate painted with red billowing flames and begin playing the five-chord riff I’m stuck on in a loop, minus the dead B-flat.
“What the fuck am I missing?” I ask, frustrated that my small pause still offered no clarity.
“Oh,” Jade laughs, and it’s light and airy. She jumps down from the sill she was perched on. “That’s easy.”
I slide my creaking chair out, opening the keys to her, the way I always have.
“An F-flat before the quiet B-flat,” she states, her fingers tapping out the riff with an added F-flat.
“See?” She pauses, then adds as much of her left hand as the keyboard will allow, filling it out like she’s done for years.
“That fucks now,” she finishes, her hands slipping off the keys, walking back toward the windowsill where she snatches up the cigarette she left smoldering on the edge, returning it to her mouth.
I stare at her in bewilderment. “How do you do that, J?”
She shrugs, burning another line down her throat. “It’s magic.” A grin extends across her lips, her crooked canine tooth peeking over her bottom one.
“Teach me,” I demand, rubbing my hands together, excitement a new, reinforced live wire through me.
She raises the hand holding her cigarette, pinching her ear lobe.
“Use these…” She starts to say before dropping her open palm to her chest and placing it where her heart sits.
“And make sure you let yourself feel it right here, too. Because if you don’t…
” She tsks, shaking her head. “You’ll never find what you’re looking for. ”
Goosebumps pop across my limbs and I try to mask the shiver that starts at my skull and shoots all the way to my toes, but she catches it, laughing again.
Jade was fucking talented. She could hear what I couldn’t, find what I wasn’t able to. She made my shit better; she made it unique. Harlen could do it too, but there was something about sharing moments like this with your sibling that could never be outweighed or replaced.
I just wish she did more with it—her music.
I shake my head. “Please tell me you’re gonna do something with that, J. Your talent…it's rare. It’s fucking…” A pause. “Special.”
She drops her eyes from mine, shakes her head. “Nah, not for me, big brother.” Then she curls her fingers around her knees and squeezes them, raising her shoulders to her ears.
“Why?” I ask, my brows pulling together.
Another heavy pause thickens the air around us.
“Because music is your future, Chase. You’re destined for that.”
I snort, then I drop my gaze from hers, dragging a trembling hand through the top of my hair, blowing out my cheeks.
You are nothing, a nobody, boy. A talentless waste of air space. Dad’s voice crackles again, and it pisses me off, and I think maybe Jade can hear the phantom static too because she whispers, “And I fucking mean that.”
I palm my jaw, crack it. I need another smoke. “Yeah, sure, the idiot that can’t find a missing note.”
She smiles. “Yeah, you kind of are an idiot.”
I point at her. “Careful.”
She chuckles freely, taking the last pull from her cigarette, turning to stub it out on the rotting windowsill. She fans the smoke cloud away.
“You might be an idiot, Chase, but you’re an idiot with a set of pipes that will set the entire world on fire.”
“I—” I try to talk but she instantly cuts me off.
Jade jumps from her perch with a light thud, walks toward me, jerking her chin at the knife still clamped in my hand. “Gimme that.”
But she snatches it away before I can hand it over.
I kick back from my seat, standing and moving toward the single mattress that sits on top of the cold hardwood floors. I take a seat at the end, hanging my wrists over my knees, watching my sister fall into the chair I just came out of, swiftly dragging herself toward the table with a screech.
Her left hand begins to loop through the same riff, the other carving into my desk, and I’m not too sure what she’s doing but I listen carefully when she adds a high D.
And a shiver sweeps across my skin.
Then she holds the sustain, kicks back, spins around.
“Think fast!” she shouts for a second time, and I see the pocketknife—that’s still open—circle through the air, heading right toward me.
The blade nicks my palm, my fingers instinctively curling around the handle.
I transfer it to my opposite one, casually sucking on the bead of blood that pearls to the surface.
Jade is smiling when she comes to her feet, and I shove up from the mattress, falling back into the tattered leather seat, hitting the high D. I’m scratching at my chin when I feel her curl around my shoulders again, the same way she had when she walked in.
The two words she’d added to my desk stare back at me.
Let’s fucking bleed.
Every blood vessel in my body cools.
“Drag us through your rubble, tough guy.” She squeezes me, then playfully shoves my head before walking out of my room.